During this tumultuous year, digital tools have let us keep working even as we’ve shuttered once-busy office spaces, moved by the millions to home offices and learned to do many previously face-to-face tasks remotely. The result is that we’re more dependent than ever on technology – which leaves us more vulnerable than ever to cyber threats.
“Seriously, virtually nothing is the same as it was in 2019,” said Craig Stilwell, OpenText™ EVP and GM for SMB & Consumer, during his keynote presentation titled “Cyber Resilience in 2020 and Beyond” at OpenText™ World 2020. “We’ve increased the surface area for the bad guys to go after, and we’ve never needed to be more resilient than we need to be right now.”
Ensuring your digital fitness
Craig described resilience as digital fitness – the ability to bounce back from an adverse event and return to living and working as normally as possible. Those events could be anything from spilled juice on a phone to a stolen laptop, from a data center fire to a cyber-attack.
Small businesses are especially vulnerable to such threats – 43% were the victims of security breaches in 2018, and 2019 saw 151.9 million ransomware attacks. In fact, cyber-attacks are becoming more sophisticated all the time, which means defense strategies need to continually keep up.
What’s more, Craig said, “the cost of not being resilient isn’t always measured in just hard dollars. It’s not only paying off the bad guys for the ransomware attack; it’s also the downtime and the loss of productivity.”
Developing a cyber resilience strategy
To prevent this, organizations need a cyber resilience strategy that keeps devices and data safe by identifying threats in real time and blocking them before they can do any damage.
“People often ask us, ‘How does this whole thing work?’” said Hal Lonas, SVP and CTO, SMB & Consumer. “’How does threat intelligence work? Where do you get the data from? How does it come together?’ Well, the key to this is having over 95 million global sensors, which are mostly our own products, which are treated as threat telemetry coming into the platform.”
All those devices and sensors provide more than six petabytes of information, representing over 840 million internet domains and 37 billion URLs. OpenText’s Webroot and Carbonite solutions use that information to identify and proactively block any online locations that could pose a threat to users.
For example, OpenText customer Menlo Security uses those tools to support its global cloud proxy service, which is essentially a cloud-based browser that directs customers’ web traffic through Menlo Security’s cloud servers. Menlo Security uses Webroot and Carbonite not only to prevent customers’ access to questionable sites but to provide them with insights about those threats.
That kind of threat intelligence is key to cyber resilience, providing users with greater context about different locations on the web, and how these fit into the threat landscape. As Hal summarized, “The importance of this, beyond just knowing, is that I can stop attacks much earlier.”
OpenText Cloud Editions (CE) 20.4 includes the OpenText Security & Protection Cloud, which provides organizations with a range of new security tools and capabilities. Among these are Webroot BrightCloud Threat Intelligence services and enterprise-focused Carbonite solutions to ensure availability and protect against data losses on endpoints and Microsoft 365 applications.
Watch the session on demand.
